Career

After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist.[10] Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remains active with its Board of Directors.[9]

Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) attracted international attention.[3] His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".[11] The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.[12]

He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis and retiring in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the US after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irish Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.

His epic poem, Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from The Iliad, has been critically praised "as Walcott's major achievement."[2] The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose the book as one of its "Best Books of 1990".

Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honor after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”[3] He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[13] for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

His later poetry collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolors;[14] The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T.S. Eliot Prize.[3][10]

In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.[15]

Oxford Professor of Poetry candidacy

In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of documented accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.[16] (The latter case was settled by Boston University out of court.)[17] When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, this aroused their interest in the university decisions.[18][19]

Ruth Padel, also a leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases.[20][21] Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned.[20][22] Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and journalists including Libby Purves, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the American Macy Halford and the Canadian Suzanne Gardner attributed the criticism of her to misogyny[23][24] and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumour.[25][26]

Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore.[27] Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair, because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination".[28] Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.[29][30]

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This poetry hailed from what was once the British Commonwealth. English was the international language of most of the British colonies. After the Commonwealth was dismantled, the literature that originated in these colonies; Africa, West Indies,...

Essays for Derek Walcott: Collected Poems

Derek Walcott: Collected Poems literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the post-colonial poetry of Derek Walcott.